How an 'only child' discovered that she had 17 siblings

Claudia Beard was raised as an only child, but has since discovered 17 siblings.
Claudia Beard
One Father's Day, when Claudia Beard was in primary school, she was asked to draw her family tree.

She filled in one side easily, drawing pictures of her mother, aunt, uncle, and grandparents. Then she hit a problem. Beard did not know who her father was. She did not even know his name.

Her teacher took her to one side.

"Just draw what you think he is like," the teacher said.

"That made me angry," Beard told Business Insider. "I shouldn't have to pretend. I don't have a Dad and that's it."

Beard's father is an anonymous sperm donor. Raised by her mother in New York City, Beard said her childhood was happy, but at times she longed for a stereotypical family life, with brothers and sisters.

As Beard grew older she found out that she actually had at least 17 siblings, who all had the same father, spread across the US.

She located them using the Donor Sibling Registry— a website that brings together siblings who came from the same donor. The site currently has more than 50,000 members and it has connected more than 13,400 half-siblings and donors with each other. While sperm donors are kept anonymous, each is assigned a number; by sharing this number with the database, siblings are able to find each other.

Finding out that you have a sibling that you have never met must be overwhelming. Beard explained what it was like to discover 17.

Claudia (right) with the first two siblings she met, Gus and Macy, in 2002.
Claudia Beard

Claudia's mother, Robin Beard contacted the sperm donor company California Cryobank when she was 39. She was sent a thick binder containing the profiles of all the available donors. One of them stood out: a young man who was healthy, intelligent, tall, and, like her, Jewish.

After the first attempt at insemination, Robin Beard became pregnant.

On April 8, 1996, Claudia was born.

From the outset, Beard's mother told her the truth about her father. The mother and daughter kept the binder and together they often re-read Beard's father's profile.

"I had the binder in the living room. That was my dad," Beard said. "It was fun and it was weird. I didn't really know what to think about it. That was just my life."

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Claudia (left) and Gus (right).
Claudia Beard

Until she was seven, Beard had no idea that she had any siblings.

"I had never connected the dots that because she used a donor, there could be other kids," Beard said.

Then, one day after school, Beard's mother sat her down at the kitchen table.

"Guess what?" she said, "You have siblings!"

"I was kind of confused, but I was really excited," Beard explained. Her mother had signed up to the Donor Sibling Registry and immediately Claudia had two matches.

After looking through photos of Gus and Macy, who were themselves full siblings, the two mothers contacted each other and arranged a meeting.

When Claudia met Eve, who was just three months younger than her, there was an "immediate connection."

"We looked so much alike at that age," Beard said. "She was from California. I thought she was really cool. I wanted to wear cool outfits to impress her."

After Claudia and Eve's meeting, new matches appeared on the Donor Sibling Registry around once a year.

The siblings' mothers, who began to refer to each other as the DILs (the "donor-in-laws") on a private Facebook group, were at first more excited at the prospect of new matches than the kids.

"Even though it was so cool, it took me a while to appreciate," Beard said. "It made me different and, as a kid, I didn't want that."

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The 2013 reunion.
Claudia Beard

Whenever Beard re-read her father's profile, she was struck by the similarities between them.

"It was describing my face," Beard said. "It was uncanny."

They shared the same eye colour, hair, skin tone, and, more surprisingly, the same interests in athletics and art.

"I always felt like I was similar to my mum, but I also felt like I was similar to that binder," Beard said.

When Beard was 16, the siblings had their biggest family party. Seven separated siblings and their mothers met up at Beard's half-sister Charlotte's house in North Carolina.

There were many differences between them: some had been raised with fathers, while others were not; some lived in the countryside, while others were from cities; some had full siblings, and others, like Claudia had been raised as only children.

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Claudia and Eve meeting their sibling Charlotte for the first time at the 2013 party.
Claudia Beard

Now that many of the children are over 18, they are entitled to contact their genetic father. However, they have each decided to resist, at least for now.

"None of us really wants to. Everyone seems to be really stable in their lives and no one really feels that they need to fill that void," Beard said.

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Claudia (left) with Eve (right) in Israel in 2015.
Claudia Beard

One of the major characteristics that the siblings share is that they are all Jewish.

In the summer of 2015, Claudia and Eve, who had become especially close, travelled to Israel together on a free trip, organised by Birthright— a not-for-profit organisation which sponsors trips to the country for young Jewish people.

"Everyone kept calling us 'the sisters' because we looked alike and I think we were the only siblings on the trip," Claudia remembered. "I'd consider her one of my closest friends."

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Claudia and Eve on the Birthright trip to Israel in 2015.
Claudia Beard

The most recently discovered sibling Emily, 19, is around the same age as Claudia and also lives in New York City.

Despite being brought up in the same city, the pair have only met once.

"My mom brought up [the possibility of me having siblings] in middle school and said: 'If you want to contact them, we can find a way,'" Emily told Business Insider.

"I was like OK, but I guess I just never brought it back up."

Emily finally signed up to the registry in 2015. However, it was not until June 2016 that Emily reached out to the Beards.

"I emailed on a Thursday and my mom and I met up with Claudia and her mom on the Saturday," Emily said.

"It was really cool to talk about the things we had in common. We don't look anything alike, but we all have the same chin, apparently."

Over dinner, the half-sisters agreed that, throughout their lives, one question had been particularly tough to answer: